


Steely Eyes - a post-endgame ironkids oneshot

by ironmessTM



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 09:13:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18937924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ironmessTM/pseuds/ironmessTM
Summary: What will we do, now that's he's gone? Who will be the center of our world?And most importantly...who did he leave at the center of his?This is my attempt at a hopefully-angsty telling of the grief that Stark likely left in his wake after the events of Avengers: Endgame.This the first of my writing that I've ever actually posted, so...be nice...? (please) and I hope you enjoy. Well, you might cry. I know I was close. I hope I can bring you close, too.:-)





	Steely Eyes - a post-endgame ironkids oneshot

***

Morgan Stark is sitting at her kitchen table and trying to read a book, but her mind is too muddled and off-balance to comprehend anything it says. The words, distant and hazy in meaning, float off of the pages, and lazily in the air around her as though they might as well be miles away. She doesn’t know why she’s aimlessly torturing herself like this, trying to carry on as though nothing’s changed. It won’t make a difference, because...it can’t. Everything’s changed.

She knows that he’s not coming back.

She looks up, hearing a faint thump on the cabin doorstep, mildly grateful for an excuse to put the mostly pointless book aside. The door slowly creaks open and falls shut, and she sees that Peter, his hair messy and the chestplate of his spider-suit tinted black with a thin layer of soot, has returned from wherever he swung off to save the day this time. He had been watching over her during the afternoon, the two of them mostly lost and alone in the looming clouds of grief that hung low over their heads, threatening to consume them completely at any moment. They were sitting like this, isolated and together in equal measure, when he’d gotten got the alert that he was needed somewhere in the city. That was a couple of hours ago. Pepper had been upstairs this whole time, of course, so even without Peter next to her, Morgan wasn’t alone at home, but her mother has been…she’s been coping in her own way. It has been just under a week since the funeral, but all this…it’s barely real. It lies, unsettled like a still-falling layer of dust, for what is left of the Stark family to stare at it, unsure of what to do with the gaping hole in their hearts or of how they can possibly continue on. When Morgan had first seen the hologram, sitting on the couch in the late afternoon after the funeral, with those he had held dear standing speechless and emotional, with the beginnings of tears glistening in their reddened eyes and adults and children alike in disarray around her, she couldn’t believe any of it. He was right in front of them, talking to them. So how is it that…how was it that he… _wasn’t_? When it finished, she’d asked for it to be played again. And again. She’d watched it over, and over, the daylight slowly waning and the number of people around her eventually dwindling, until the only ones left who could bear it any longer were herself, and her strong, loyal, new older brother Peter. She’d known she could trust him, because he loved their father, and he refused to leave her. He sat for hours, silently imploding, keeping all his emotion and grief pent up and letting it eat him away from the inside, just to stay by her side. Because as the darkness-drenched, star-speckled sky around them, without a moon to cast it alight or a father to gaze at it with her, achieved its darkest hour, she could mouth each and every word along with him as he said them. But he wasn’t saying them.

He couldn’t be saying them, and wouldn't be saying them ever again, because he was dead.

This is what she was told, and what she is unceasingly reminded of every moment of every day since then. She’s reminded that he’s gone when she opens her eyes in the morning, and a fleeting moment of innocence, of hope, gets stolen away by the horrible realization hitting her all over again. The realization that she’ll never again wake up to his tired, smiling face against her pillow, or his voice calling her one loving nickname or the other from the door as he steps through it with warm arms to give her a hug. She is still unable to understand it, and almost endlessly grapples with it to no avail. All she knows, is that he isn’t around to tuck her into bed at night anymore. That she’s never again going to see him staring at Peter’s photo in the kitchen, his gaze clouded, far away and lost in another lifetime. That she’s never again going to get to watch him work on his holographic blueprints or designs, practically glowing with a smile on his face and a joke or fond remark readying at his lips. That they’re never again going to share chocolate milk at three in the morning when neither of them can fall asleep, for reasons he had never explained beyond a weary smile and reasons that she never felt the need to worry about, because he was there with her, and he seemed content in that. That they’re never again going to laugh together, watching and pointing and reading as he walks her through Peter’s Avengers fanboy page on his old Tumblr account from when he was ten or eleven.

That she’s never again…never again going to get the chance to tell him that she loves him three thousand. To tell him that…that she loves him _more,_ so much more than the number three thousand could ever encapsulate.

It’s those little things, the infinitesimal facts of this strange, twisted new reality, a reality without the most important person in her life in it, that hurt her, that prick and prod unceasingly at her heart, because those are the things that she can almost wrap her head around. She doesn’t know what it means that he’s dead, and she doesn’t think that she’ll ever know.

She only knows what it means that he isn’t alive to love her anymore.

Peter can tell that she’s lost, engulfed in thought, and he knows firsthand what a heavy burden it is that she carries. It hurts him too, but he won’t let her carry it alone. He can’t. So instead of curling up in a ball in the corner and letting it all go, as he so desperately wishes he could, he takes a deep breath, and he dusts himself off over the well-loved doormat. He then walks over to her with a fatigued smile and weary eyes, red from the silent, purely internal crying and empty, heaving sobs he’ll never let her see, and sits down beside her, ready to take her pain away for as long as he possibly can.

“Hey, Morgy.” She doesn’t acknowledge him in words, instead choosing to shift over so that she is tucked comfortably into his side. He gently places a hand on her shoulder in a protective, reassuring gesture, and she innocently snuggles ever so slightly closer. “Do you…” Peter starts. “Do you want to...do you want to hear a story? I could…maybe I could tell you one about your dad.” Peter doesn’t know if he’s saying the right things, but from her mostly emotionless, distant nod, he believes that he’s treading on neutral ground. He gives a silent, shaky breath, praying with all his might that he can make this better. Not for himself, but for the sake of his newfound younger sister, whom he will fight to protect from anything that he can, and even more so, from everything that he can’t. It scares him more than he is willing to admit, that while he is very much capable of keeping her safe from the demons of outer space or the Earth, he can do almost nothing against the demons of grief and the cold, numbing, cumbersome burden of sadness that is loss.  
“Well…let’s see…” He says, trying to think of a story that he can make it to the end of. “there was the time he got engaged to your mom. Do you know how that happened?” She slowly shakes her head, still vacantly staring off into the distance. Her father had never told her, because the one time she’d asked, he’d gone silent, looking down at his hands and hiding his expression from her. He had then proceeded to distract her from that topic entirely, with a conveniently timed batch of brownies that dinged fresh from the oven, almost on cue. They’d had a lovely afternoon, and she’d simply never thought to ask him again. She feels a slight, innocent pang of regret that she never did. 

Peter can tell that she’s still listening, and continues. Grief is a thick wall, with the ability to surround and brutally ensnare a person, but as powerful as it can be...it isn’t always entirely impenetrable. There's still...there's still hope. Somewhere. Peter just needs to _find_ it, and help Morgan hold onto it for as long as possible. Until it doesn't all hurt so bad. “He set up a big press conference and told them that he had something big to announce. You know how he is—” as he says the word, he realizes his mistake, and feels almost slammed. The needed change in tense caught him when he was least ready for it, and he tries—albeit in vain—to avoid the weight that the mere thought of it carries altogether. He just barely notices her flinch. “W-was.” he stammers, almost in defeat. “Was, I mean. He didn’t give them a single hint, it drove them crazy. There was a whole room packed full of them, reporters, newspaper people, all clamoring, a-and anxious, about what the big news could be. In the meantime…he’d called me to the Avengers facility, and he was talking to me about making me a full-time Avenger. He hadn’t even asked, really, he more or less just jumped right into the details because he was so sure I’d say yes, and that was why he’d called the press in. To reveal the newest addition to the Avengers team, the amazing...Spider-Man. But…they weren’t actually going to get what they were waiting for, because…I…I told him no.” At this, Morgan looks up at him in a muted, but genuine, surprise. “I know. A couple days before that, I-I probably would’ve said yes without even letting him ask the question. In fact, I’d been the one asking him. But…I’d learned that, maybe, keeping my feet close to the ground was a good idea.” He pauses, a train of thought beginning to weave itself to life in his mind. “You know…” he starts, unsure of whether or not to go on. He looks down at Morgan’s big, bright eyes, and thinks about the person he sees in them. The person he misses, and the person who misses him too, and needs Peter to be strong right now. Peter decides to finish what he started, to soldier on as he feels obligated to. He refuses in this moment, as he has in every moment since he came home and was then sent reeling with loss, to be the child he so desperately wishes he could let himself be. He bears the full weight of his burden alone, and in silence, because if he can’t, then…maybe…then maybe he might just deserve it. 

“I…I think that the people he loved the most…those were the people, wh-who could tell him ‘no’. The people who just…went along with everything he said…he knew that they didn’t love him enough to say otherwise, to tell him whatever it was that he needed to hear.” He pauses, experiencing a moment of clarity, in a way, as the words come together on the tip of his tongue. “Those people, they were his fans, not his…not his family.” His voice catches, and he stops. He closes his eyes, taking perfectly silent, ragged breaths. He opens them, ready to continue with the story, when he forgets all of that, letting the memory and the mostly sugarcoated words he had planned clatter to the floor. Because as he looks at this precious little girl, he sees her doing the same thing he was doing only moments before, and in this moment, she is all that matters. Because seeing her chest flutter with inaudible, heaving breaths and her eyebrows knit together in frustration, in pain, only serve to hurt Peter further. 

It’s as though…it’s as though he’s failed.

“M-Morgy? Are…are you okay?” He knows he could’ve asked a much better question, but nonetheless, when his worry is substantiated quite like this, it makes some desperate sort of sense. She has been in little more than a quiet haze for the past several days, keeping it all at bay, just barely on the other side of a thin, foggy barrier. It terrifies him more deeply than he knew possible, to see that barrier being broken through, and furthermore…to see the forlorn hope that perhaps she could ward off the pain forever slowly shatter and fall away before his eyes at the cruel, unforgiving hands of reality, never to be put back to together again.

Morgan clenches her fists, her eyes squeezed tightly shut as though she’s trying with all her might to banish the tears, tears he knew would break him to see her shed, down and far, far away. Then she draws one last shaky, but firm, clean line of air, and rises to her feet, her head bowed as she now stands eye level with Peter. She slowly, calmly tilts her head upright, and opens her red-rimmed, moist, steely eyes…eyes alight with a burning conviction in them, that Peter never thought he would see again. 

Because they were the eyes of the man to whom he thought he’d said his final goodbye.

Seeing her like this pains him in an entirely new way, striking him straight through his core, twisting into his heart and making it ache in agony with every erratic beat it manages to pump out through the anguish. “I’m fine.” Morgan says icily, the words clipped and brusque with little more than a fleeting, fading hint of sadness behind them, betraying almost none of the feelings that she denies so strongly, so desperately, that she has the capacity to feel; even as they slowly begin to swallow her whole. And with that, she turns and walks out of the room, leaving Peter as distraught and alone as the moment wherein he clutched his dying father in arms, and the moment wherein he was forced to let go of him for the very last time.

As a single tear rolls down Peter’s face, that small, innocent drop of salt water holding every last indescribable ounce of pain inside him, Peter feels it full-force for the first time. It truly sinks in, it finally reaches out and grasps him mercilessly by the shoulders, its sharp talons digging cruelly into his chest as it stares him in the eyes with the face of a nightmare. It is finally, and completely, unavoidable; the soul-striking, merciless truth, that nothing in his world will ever truly be the same. And this is the moment wherein Peter Parker’s heart…finally, at long last, breaks.

Because without Anthony Edward Stark in it…a great piece of his world, and his heart, is gone forever. And the rest of the pieces…they’re left to crumble away, as they face the brutally heart-wrenching reality that now, they must pull themselves back together on their own. Because, as Peter has been made to realize more times than anyone ever should…when a father dies…

His children…are plunged deep, deep down, into the unrelenting shadows along with him.

And even if they do, eventually, find their way back, they will carry shreds of their loss, heavy inside their heart, with them forever…awaiting the day when they will find peace; and at long, long last, be able to meet his fond gaze, and hold his gentle, loving hands in theirs...once again.

***


End file.
